Category Archives: Non-Fiction

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Maya Angelou

13 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Non-Fiction

≈ 2 Comments

“The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

Three strong black women stand out in this first volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography: Momma, the grandmother Angelou lived with when she was a child; Vivian, Angelou’s mother; and Angelou herself, a bookish, sensitive child who has to grow up quickly.

When her parents’ marriage founders, Angelou, then three years old, and her brother Bailey, four, are sent off to live with Momma in Stamps, Arkansas. They arrive, a little bewildered, but are soon taken under Momma’s wing. The children move between Momma and Vivian over the course of years.

Momma runs the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store, where the children work after school. Their uncle Willie, who was hurt during the war, lives with them. This was the Deep South in the 1930s, when segregation and lynching were facts of life. “High points in Stamps were usually negative: droughts, floods, lynching and death.” Angelou paints a picture of a community that was close, surrounded by rampant racism.

Momma is a formidable woman: someone who can navigate the minefield of dealing with white people. But she is not a woman to be pushed around. When a white dentist to whom Momma has lent money without interest when he needed it refuses to treat Angelou’s toothache because he doesn’t treat blacks, Momma is furious. She marches into his office and demands 10 dollars in interest for her loan. He protests but Momma holds her ground—his outrageous behaviour doesn’t qualify him for favours, as far she can see. He hands the money over, and Momma uses it to take Angelou to the coloured dentist.

When Angelou is eight and living with her mother in St. Louis, Vivian’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, who seems gentle enough on the surface, rapes her. When her family finds out they have him arrested. Angelou’s description of the court scene reflects the confusion an eight-year-old feels about rape, worried that she might have been partly to blame. It is heart-breaking.

Vivian comes through as a strong woman, a card player who can hold her own with any man. She believes in letting her children make their own choices and is generally supportive of their decisions. Vivian hopes “for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.” So when she finds out that Angelou, in her final year of high school, is pregnant, she takes it in her stride.

The racism is pervasive. At the graduation ceremony in her school in Stamps, a white man gives a patronizing speech to the students that clearly implies that the real promise of the nation lies in the town’s white school. “The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren’t even on it) would try to be Jesse Owens and Joe Louises.”

But persistence can sometimes pay off. In Oakland, California, faced with a hostile white female streetcar conductor, Angelou decides that, come hell or high water, she is going to become a streetcar conductor. Never mind that no black woman had ever held that job before. Encouraged by Vivian, she refuses to accept defeat, in spite of several rejections until finally, the company gives up and hires her.

This is a powerful story, poignant, funny at times and well-observed. Angelou writes beautifully, whether she is describing pain or just the beauty of a perfect moment. It is a classic, and if you haven’t already read it, you should. Angelou is not only a great writer, but she was also a civil rights activist, and in this book, she combines the two, never hectoring or lecturing, but merely telling us how it was.

And is.

My Name is Gauhar Jaan! The Life and Times of a Musician: Vikram Sampath

09 Saturday May 2020

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Media / Film / Music, Non-Fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

By Sadhana Ramchander

I have been fascinated by Gauhar Jaan’s life ever since I came to know about her. I bought this hard-bound book in the bookshop A A Hussian some years ago but it sat on my shelves for a long time. I finally read it, and am so glad I did because it gave me a peek into not only her amazing life but also into the journey of classical Hindustani music and musicians of the time.

Gauhar Jaan (1873-1930) was a singer and dancer from Kolkata, and one of the first Indian voices to have been recorded on 78 rpm gramophone records in 1902. The initial days of this process was painstaking and a musician’s worst nightmare. “The singer had to crane his or her neck into a narrow horn fixed on the wall and literally scream as loud as possible. The volume of the voice would ensure that the needle rotated and cut the grooves on the disc”. Added to this, a recording agent forcefully held the head of the singer in place because they were used to shaking their heads and gesticulating while singing (as they still do)!

The other interesting thing about the recordings was that the singer announced her name at the end of the recording since the wax masters of the records were sent to Hanover where the records were made, and the technicians there would not know who the singer was. Therefore, at the end of all her recordings, Gauhar Jaan says in a shrill, child-like and playful voice, “My name is Gauhar Jaan”!  This, justifiably, is the title of the book.  

Gauhar Jaan’s story has been pieced together by Vikram Sampath after painstaking research, and has a lot of details. She was born Eileen Angelina Yeoward, an Armenian Christian who converted to Islam when her mother married a Muslim gentleman. She was a naturally gifted singer, was very popular and made nearly 600 records.

The book begins with her childhood and her learning years, her loves and disappointments, and her journey to becoming a star in the world of Hindustani music. She was a much-sought-after musician, was very well dressed and stylish, and went around Kolkata in a horse-drawn carriage. She was particularly known for her thumris,[1] and sang in many royal courts all over India. The success of her gramophone records made her a celebrity in India, and she was also known in Europe. Hers was a story of great glory, and yet extreme sadness because she was not successful in love, much as she yearned for a happy relationship.

Towards the end of her life, she lost all that she earned, and finally reached the court of Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV of Mysore, where she was appointed Palace Musician. Unfortunately, she died there within 18 months of going there.

‘My name is Gauhar Jaan’ ends with the following quote:

Hum tho markar bhi kitabon mein rahenge zinda;
Gham unhi ka hai jo mar jaayen tho guzar jaaten hain

(Even in death I will remain immortal in the books that are written about me
Pity those who don’t just die, but pass away into oblivion.)

The book comes with a CD with her earliest recordings, and of course, her signature ‘My name is Gauhar Jaan’ at the end of each recording. It is such a delight to listen to them!

Gauhar Jaan’s life was also made into a fascinating play I saw some years back. It was written by Mahesh Dattani and directed by the very talented Lilette Dubey. It was brilliantly acted and the actors – Rajeshwari Sachdev, Zila and others –  also sang Gauhar’s thumris beautifully.

[1] Thumri is a light-classical song form in classical Hindustani music with romantic or devotional lyrics.

A Book of Silence: Sara Maitland

11 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Nature, Non-Fiction

≈ 1 Comment

“It is quite hard to remember which came first—the freedom of solitude or the energy of silence. … I became less driven, more reflective and great deal less frenetic. And into that space flowed silence: I would go out into the garden at night or in the early morning and just look and listen… . For the first time in my life I noticed the gradation of colours before sunrise—from indigo through apricot to a lapidary blueness.”

Our society seems to be getting noisier. Noise follows us everywhere—in the busyness of cities, the music in shops and 24-hour television. And even when there is no sound, there is noise of another kind—the distraction of social media and smartphones. It feels like people are afraid of being quiet. And paradoxically, quiet is also what many people yearn for: a slowing down, the time to stop and notice, and to reflect.

Sara Maitland grew up in a noisy household, where the children were encouraged to voice their opinions. She loved talking, so much so that she says her hobby was depnisophy (skill at dinner party talk). But after her divorce, when she starts to live alone, she finds what she really needs is silence and moves to an isolated house on the moor in Weardale, near the Penines.

Maitland is curious about silence: what it means, how it affects people differently and what drives those who go in search of it. She sets out to answer these questions both by going to remote places and by reading the accounts of others who have, voluntarily or involuntarily, spent long periods by themselves.

But how do you define silence? Is it just an absence of noise, of conversation, or a complete emptying of the mind? Does reading, or listening to classical music (without vocals) or loud bird calls count as being silent?

Before I read this, I hadn’t realized how many kinds of silence there were. There is the silence of hermits, and the one experienced by people alone on boats in the middle of the seas or hiking in the wilderness; the kind that focuses inward and the kind where the boundaries between the self and the universe fade. And there is the dark side, the path to madness.

People often fear the absence of sound, of communication. A retreat from the world and into utter silence is often seen as an indication of something not quite right, and a risk that isolation can lead to insanity. Rather than something that enriches, it is seen as an absence, a lack. Maitland disagrees. As a practising Christian and a writer, she values silence and the way it opens up a space within.

She writes about how the quality of silence changes with the landscape. The silence of the desert is very different from that of a forest. She goes to the Sinai desert and for the first time, hears “the sound of silence…the absence of anything to hear”. In a forest, there is always some sound—water, creatures or the wind through the trees. Also, in a desert or on a moor, everything is visible for miles. The forest, on the other hand, holds secrets, which is why fairy tales are so often set there. 

Silence can affect the mind, playing tricks on it. One winter when she was snowed in, she ventures out for a walk. About half a mile from her house, she hears a terrifying sound, like the wailing of the damned. She is convinced that it will drive her insane, but eventually realizes that it was the wind.

But on the whole, there is more to gain than lose from silence. Being alone with your thoughts makes you more reflective, more self-aware and more still within. As the quote at the beginning of this piece shows, you become more aware of nature, of tiny changes and their meanings. 

This is a rich book with interesting ideas, and a lot of research—it is full of quotes from other writers, which is sometimes interesting but at other times, a little too much. I learned a lot from this—and not just about silence.

The Places in Between: Rory Stewart

15 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Non-Fiction, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Rory Stewart had set out to walk from Iran all the way to Nepal—through Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. But in December 2000, when the Iranian government took away his visa, the Taliban refused to allow him to enter Afghanistan. So Stewart had to go directly to Pakistan. At the end of 2001, when he heard that the Taliban had fallen, he decided to return to Afghanistan and walk from Herat in the west of the country to Kabul. He took a shorter route through the mountains, even though it was during the middle of winter.

However, before he can begin his journey, Stewart has to explain to the Afghan Security Services why he is walking across the country and reassure them that he is not spying for the UK government. “It is mid-winter—there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves and there is a war”, the man from the Security Services tells him. “You will die, I can guarantee. Do you want to die?” Stewart is finally allowed to continue, but only on condition that two men from the Security Services accompany him for part of the way. Stewart knows that it would not go down well in the villages where he would be spending the nights, but there is nothing he can do about it.

This is a fascinating account. Stewart is always aware of the juxtaposition of history with the present. Herat, once “a great medieval market for China, Turkey, and Persia…was now selling Chinese alarms clocks, Turkish sunglasses and Iranian apple juice”. Throughout his book he quotes the Baburnama—written by the first Mughal emperor, Babur, about his journey from Afghanistan to India in the early 16th century—thus connecting Babur’s time with ours.

Stewart is not always welcome in the villages. War has led to a mistrust of strangers. Fortunately, he speaks enough Dari (one of the Afghan languages) to hold conversations with the men he meets (and it is almost always men). He speaks with Afghans who fought in the wars that began in the late 1970s, first during the Russian invasion and then during the civil war.

Politics in Afghanistan is never straightforward. The headman of a village he stays in had been a military commander for 24 years, first fighting the Russians with a group funded by Pakistani intelligence and then with a group funded partially by the British. “Then the Russians withdrew and he fought the pro-Russian Najib government and the rival Northern Alliance groups. When the Taliban took over the province five years earlier, he decided, he said, to ‘retire from fighting’. This probably meant that he had been the Taliban commander in the area but would deny it if I asked him.”

Eventually, the two security men leave Stewart, but he acquires a new friend—a dog the size of a small pony, given to him by villagers, whom he names Babur. Man and dog then help each other through blizzards and snow drifts.

And then there is the landscape, which changes all the time, from deep snow on the mountains to this: “We walked on through hills whose brilliant colours showed metal ores in the soil: a rock face striped like candy, a crest of snow-softened russet, then slopes of green and orange sandstone, and finally, a cliff streaked with bull’s blood red.”

This book is important, coming at a time when the world knows so little about Afghanistan excerpt for the wars and the bombings.

I lived in Afghanistan as a child in the early 1970s, before the Russians invaded. My memories are of a beautiful, rugged country and a warm and hospitable—and fiercely independent—people. But the scars left by decades of war are going to take a long time to heal. There were times in this book when I could barely recognize the country I had known.

The walk across Afghanistan really brings home just how diverse the country and its people are: the various tribes, languages and landscapes. Stewart does not romanticize any of this but tries to portray the country and its people with honesty and empathy. I just hope that this magnificent land will find peace someday.

32 Yolks: From my Mother’s Table to Working the Line: Eric Ripert

10 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Non-Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

With Veronica Chambers

“Only if you cook what you love and truly understand will people be happy with your food.”

Good food—how it can sustain you, both physically and emotionally—is the centre of these memoirs. Eric Ripert, a well-known chef, writes about growing up in France and Andorra, and his early years in the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants.

Ripert didn’t have an easy childhood. His adored parents, Monique and André, split up when he was very young, and André moved away. His stepfather Hugo bullied him when Monique wasn’t around, which was every afternoon after school. At 7 years old, there wasn’t much that Ripert could do.

Not surprisingly, he became a “difficult child”. When he was 8, his mother sent him off to a Catholic boarding school, something he saw as an ultimate betrayal from the one person he relied on. He didn’t stay long at the school because the priest who took him under his wing tried to molest him—yet another betrayal from an adult he trusted.

The bright thread running through these years was a love of food, inherited from Monique, a superb cook. One of the joys of the summer holidays spent with his grandparents was watching his grandmothers cook. As he says, “when things were bad, and later, when bad went to worse, food became my main source of comfort, my most consistent pleasure”.

When he was 11, André died. Ripert was devastated. To try to cheer him up, Monique took him to a small but well-known Andorran restaurant, Chez Jacques. Jacques took an immediate liking to Ripert, who would spend afternoons listening to Jacques’s war stories and watching him cook, instead of being at home with Hugo.

Inspired by Jacques, Ripert went to a cooking school and got a job as a junior chef in La Tour d’Argent, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris. Nothing he had done so far had prepared him for the gruelling work in a restaurant kitchen. The first day was a disaster. It took him 20 minutes to separate 32 eggs for his first task: to make a sauce hollandaise. The pan became unwieldy. “I didn’t have the strength to move thirty-two yolks and make a light and foamy sabayon. … I couldn’t ask…so I failed, at this simplest of tasks.”

But he worked hard and eventually got a job in Jamin, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant under Joël Robuchon, a chef with a terrifying reputation. Working at Janin made La Tour d’Argent seem easy. Robuchon lived up to his reputation and ran his kitchen on fear. There was no chatter, no kidding around—just a kitchen full of people determined not to upset the chef.

The book is poignant, heartbreaking and vivid. You get the feel of what it must be like to work in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant—the constant pressure, the heat, the lack of space and the dynamic between the people. His descriptions of food are mouth-watering: his grandmother Maguy’s apple tart, where “[t]he scent of butter and apple was sunshine itself”; Monique’s soupe au pistou, with “the basil brightening the flavour of the white beans”; and his first taste of caviar: “the saltiness, the richness, the briny finish as I swallowed it”.

And there is the way that food can capture a moment in time. In Ripert’s case this was the chocolate mousse he had the first night at Chez Jacques. “Proust had his madeleine, and because of Jacques, I had my mousse. … It is the taste of friendship. It is the taste of belly laughs, and war stories, and the memory of a man who could jump out of planes and make a leg of lamb with equal amounts of skill and ardor. But more than anything, chocolate mousse is the taste of being welcomed: of Chez Jacques, where, for me, the door was always open.”

A Broken Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen’s Secret Chord—Liel Leibovitz

22 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Media / Film / Music, Non-Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

“Lots of writers have dared walk up to the edge of reason and stare into that great chasm, into the abyss. Very few people have got there and laughed out loud at what they saw. It’s the divine comedy.”

—Bono, on Leonard Cohen

You either love or hate Leonard Cohen’s music. I bought Songs of Leonard Cohen when I was in my early 20s. I had never heard anything like it: the spare songs with minimal instrumentation, the almost monotonous but compelling voice and the clever, beautiful and sometimes funny lyrics (in spite of complaints that his music is suicidal, it’s often laced with humour). The record saw me through a period of deep depression when I was unable to listen to music. It felt like only Cohen’s songs seemed to be able to penetrate the darkness, and it is still one of my favourite albums.

Liel Leibovitz makes it very clear that this is not a biography of Cohen. Instead he tries to understand what makes Cohen so important. As he puts it, there have been better poets, more skilled novelists and songwriters with greater talent. “But Leonard Cohen lingers and thrives because he is not really any of these things, at least not essentially. He is something more intricate, the sort of man whose pores absorb the particles of beauty and grief and truth that float weightlessly all around us yet so few of us note.”

But who was Leonard Cohen and what shaped him? He was from a Jewish family in Montreal. His father, Nathan Cohen, died when he was nine, something that affected him deeply. One of his early influences was his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Klinitsky-Klein, who spent almost a year with them after his father’s death. Rabbi Klinitsky-Klein’s Judaism, with “its language of punishment and justice, of damnation and salvation”, was far more fiery than the “polite theology” that the Cohens followed. It was spiritual but also erotic, something that spoke to an adolescent Cohen. This influence can be seen through many of Cohen’s songs: the drawing on images from the Bible and the mix of the sacred and profane. As Cohen puts it: “Real spirituality…has its feet in the mud and its heart in heaven”.

If you know Cohen’s songs, you will enjoy this book. Leibovitz goes into detail about how some of the well-known songs were conceived. When Cohen went into the studio to record Songs of Leonard Cohen, the producer John Simon thought Sisters of Mercy needed a hurdy gurdy to give it a sense of a “mobile healing operation pulling into town” (quite clearly, Simon did not understand what the song was about). Cohen relegated the hurdy gurdy to the background and put the lyrics front and centre, which is where they needed to be. “If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn / They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.” Why would lyrics like these need to be dressed up?

And then, of course, there is Hallelujah, the song that took Cohen a year to write. There are probably around 80 verses but most versions—including Cohen’s—only use a handful of them. The song is a masterpiece of pain and loss.

“Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
And it’s not a cry that you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.”

What I liked about this book is that it tries to explain what made Cohen the poet/songwriter he was. It is not a gossipy, tell-all book but gives a more in-depth perspective of the times that Cohen lived in—the literary scene in Canada, the rise of the protest song in the US or the politics in Israel—and how he reacted to, and was affected by, these events. Cohen was one of the greatest poets of our times, and this book does his work justice.

The Lights of Pointe-Noire: Alain Mabanckou

25 Sunday Aug 2019

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Books in translation, Non-Fiction, The reading challenge

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Translated from French by Helen Stevenson

Alain Mabanckou left Congo in 1989, when he was 22, and didn’t go back for 23 years, not even when his mother died. Refusing to accept her death, he keeps up the myth that she is alive and well. “The truth was I dreaded coming face to face with the body of the woman I had last seen smiling, full of life.” But you can only evade the truth for so long. Returning to his hometown, Pointe-Noire, is a way of accepting her death.

His mother’s presence permeates the book. Pauline Kengué was a strong woman who felt it a dishonour to show her vulnerability to her son. He remembers, “I had to peer down deep into those eyes to catch sight of her worries; she had a way of keeping them from me, through a sudden contraction of her pupils.” Abandoned by Mabanckou’s father a few months before his birth, she left her village and moved to the town, determined to raise her child and “scale the endless steps that rose before her”. When Mabanckou was leaving for Paris, Mama Pauline travelled over 500 kilometres to Brazzaville to see him off. They spent a few hours in the café together. As she got up to go, she said to him, “Just don’t disappoint me”. He never saw her again.

A refusal to accept the death of loved ones runs through the book. Mabanckou brings his two dead older sisters “back to life” when he was in primary school to stop his classmates teasing him for being an only child. He says that they are tall, beautiful, speak almost all the known languages and drive in a red Citroën DS. The myth becomes so real that he hears his sisters come into the kitchen at night, looking for food. But he needn’t have worried. Every night, Mama Pauline has been leaving two plates of food for them outside the kitchen door.

The book is full of vivid memories of the people and the places that were part of Mabanckou’s life. The man Mabanckou calls his father is Papa Roger, Mama Pauline’s husband. He writes of him with affection: Papa Roger was responsible for getting Mabanckou interested in reading and probably laid the foundations for his career as a writer.

Then there was Grandma Hélène who took care of people, mostly by feeding them vast quantities of food. All they had to do was drift past her house at mealtimes. Mabanckou and his friend would see adults emerging from her house “fit to burst, like boa constrictors who’ve swallowed an antelope”. She cooked for an army and would remember everyone who hadn’t come to eat her food.

Twenty-three years is a long time, and the town has changed. The Victory Hotel where Papa Roger worked is still standing but the Cinema Rex, where Mabanckou used to watch Bruce Lee films, has become a Pentecostal church. The magic of the movies has been replaced by pastors threatening wrongdoers with hellfire. His old school has been renamed Lycée Victor-Augagneur, after a French colonialist, a man who was probably unknown in his own country.

Coming home is never easy when you have been away a long time. You are tugged by the old stories, legends and the things that have shaped you. But you are also a part of something outside your home—the adult who has made his/her place in the world. The Lights of Pointe-Noire reflects this dichotomy as it moves between childhood memories and the present. It is also a book of memories, grief and acceptance.

And Mama Pauline is always at the centre, like the miracle woman who lives in the moon. When the woman scatters shooting stars from her basket, children are born. And when someone dies, she turns off the stars. She was powerful but in no circumstance was she ever to be mentioned. “We kids would point her out just with a tilt of the nose, a lift of the chin, convinced we mustn’t point at her or utter the slightest sound, or we’d wake the next morning and find we’d been struck deaf or blind.” According to legend, she sacrificed herself to take on the sins of the world.

Looking up at the moon after his mother’s death, Mabanckou wonders if the old woman has retired and been replaced by a younger woman, “the woman I know best and who would have accepted the sacrifice too, the woman who brought me into this world”.

Abburi Chayadevi (1933-2019): A writer who never stopped asking questions

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Books in translation, Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Review by Sadhana Ramchander

In 2016, when Anuradha Gunupati and I met 83-year old Abburi Chayadevi to tell her about our plans to publish a book on her writing and craft, she asked, “Why do we need this book? I am already suffering from fame.” I was delighted to find that she still asked questions! Witty, and with a very good sense of humour, Chayadevi’s eyes sparkled when she spoke. She always had a lot to say and laugh about, as she sat in the room that she shared with her sister Yashodhara in the home for the aged where she had chosen to live.

Our book – Why shouldn’t girls laugh? Abburi Chayadevi – her words and craft – was published by Saptaparni in 2017. It is a bilingual (English and Telugu) book that tells her story, combining her literary work and using her crafts as illustrations. There was no official launch because she did not want one. Little did we realise at that time that, two years later, she would be gone. Perhaps this was the answer to her question, “Why do we need this book?”

Abburi Chayadevi was a writer of Telugu short stories and essays, and a very important part of the Telugu literary world. She was a “gentle” feminist, and even though she led an apparently conservative life, she expressed her feminism through her stories. In this sense, her life was a series of short stories, mostly biographical.

When Chayadevi was growing up in the 1930s, Indian women were not supposed to smile or laugh loudly. “Why not?” she asked boldly. There was also a practice in traditional households, for a menstruating woman to stay away from everyone else, becoming a sort of untouchable person. She protested against this unjust practice in two short stories: “Moodu naalla muchata” and “Amalina malinam”.

Chayadevi found it strange that women who got married became meek and never spoke their minds. Her own father was very dictatorial. To vent her helplessness and anger at her father’s attitude, she wrote a story called “Anubandham” for her college magazine.

And then she herself got married, which gave her many more questions to ask!

In “‘Upagraham -1”, she asks why newly married men so quickly begin taking their wives for granted. Why did her husband marry her if he was busy working all the time and could not spend time with her? She also found it strange that men did not express affection the way women did.

In another popular story titled, “Bonsai brathukulu”, she likened the life of a married woman to a bonsai that is pruned and shaped. She tells her sister, “Look at the bonsai you have tended so lovingly. It looks proper and sweet, like a housewife. See how delicate it is. It can’t withstand a storm and is dependent on someone for its care. A woman’s life is like that of a bonsai.”

She challenged the status quo despite being married to Abburi Varadarajeswara Rau—the well-known journalist, intellectual and poet, who was supportive yet quite chauvinistic and gave her opportunities to ask questions!

She wrote a serious and introspective story titled “Prayanam”, in which she dealt with the subject of rape. The story concludes that a rape could be compared to a car accident: if the fault was of the other driver, then why then should the woman be blamed? The story ends on a very positive note, with the raped woman being supported by a man who respects her.

Her gripping and realistic stories not only answered her own questions but touched the hearts of many readers as they identified familiar situations. She also wrote an autobiography, using photos from her family albums to illustrate her narrative.

Taken from Why shouldn’t girls laugh?

Chayadevi was more than a writer: she also very skilled at craft and doll making – all from recycled material. She was also very fond of selfies and cats. Always practical and independent, she gave away all her possessions and lived by herself in an old age home in the last years of her life.

Abburi Chayadevi passed away on 28 June 2019 after a brief illness, and as per her wishes, her eyes and body were donated to a medical college. She is someone I admire very much, and the book I did on her was one of my most challenging assignments. I feel as though I lost a dear friend. No doubt she will live on forever through her writings.

Note: Some of Chayadevi’s short stories have been translated into English. The collection has been published as Bonsai Life and other stories by Author Press. Why shouldn’t girls laugh? can be ordered from Saptaparni (mail[at]saptaparni.com).

Going to the Movies: A Personal Journey Through Four Decades of Modern Film—Syd Field

19 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Media / Film / Music, Non-Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

What makes a movie great? Why are some movies memorable while others disappear into obscurity? The foundation underlying the performances and the directing is the screenplay. A screenplay can make or break a film. Going to the Movies is a combination of memoirs and a lesson on the art of screenwriting by a man who is known to have written some of the definitive books on the subject, Syd Field.

Field studied film at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s when it was buzzing with talent. One of Field’s early mentors was Jean Renoir, one of the great French film directors, whom he met when he was studying film at the University of California, Berkeley. Renoir believed that film was a “new form of printing” and Lumière, the inventor of the motion picture camera, was the new Gutenberg (who invented printing in the 1400s).

Other students who went on to become famous were a young graduate student called Francis Ford Coppola and Ray Manzarek, who was part of a then little-known band called The Doors. It was the time of the New Wave, a revolt in cinema against the “puff films” (such as wholesome Doris Day fare). The New Wave produced films like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour[1] and Jean-Luc Goddard’s Breathless, all films that Field admired.

Field also met some of the greats of cinema during the course of his career: Renoir, Michelangelo Antonioni (whom he saw sitting on a bench as an old man and plucked up the courage to talk to) and Sam Peckinpah, with whom Field spent a summer when Peckinpah was writing The Wild Bunch.  

The book follows Field’s career and provides a glimpse into the film business, particularly the Hollywood film industry. He worked at Cinemobile, which started out as a “studio on wheels”, providing the technical and physical aspects of a film’s production. It was the brainchild of Fouad Said, who now wanted to produce his own films and had created Cine Artists. Field’s job was “find material”. For two and a half years, he read through piles of screenplays, looking for the one that would be good enough to go into production. But producers did not read scripts and had a minimal attention span: the script needed to be summarized in a couple of sentences. Among the scripts he pitched successfully were American Graffiti and Rocky, unlike Taxi Driver by Paul Schrader, for which there was no interest.   

Trawling through never-ending piles of scripts allowed Field to understand the elements that make them work—or not. Based on his close reading, Field devised a three-act paradigm that could be applied to most scripts. Briefly, this is how it works: Act 1, the first 20-30 minutes, sets the scene. This is followed by a plot point that pushes the protagonist into Act 2, which Field calls the Confrontation (and which also gives the protagonist his/her goal). Act 3 is the struggle to reach the goal and the resolution.

Field’s analyses films such as Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, Matrix and Casablanca to understand how they function. I enjoyed these analyses, and they made me want to go back to the films, so I could watch them with a different perspective, this time with an awareness of the nuts and bolts of the script.

This is an interesting book, even if you are not planning to write for films. Many cinema-goers do not always pay attention to the scriptwriter, although she/he is fundamental to the film (I do only when the writing stands out). Syd Field shines a light on this essential part of cinema: the writing on which the entire production rests.

[1] I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour when I was studying film, and I can still remember how it moved me, well over 30 years later. A powerful script.

The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Life with an Enchanting Tawny Owl—Martin Windrow

17 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Nature, Non-Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

“Shaving is tricky with an owl on your right shoulder.”

Especially when the owl sees it as a game, pecking at the razor at the end of each stroke and trying to eat the shaving cream. Meet Mumble, the Tawny Owl with whom Martin Windrow shared 15 years of his life.

Introduced to birds of prey through his older brother Dick, Windrow decides to get one of his own. Enter Wellington, a Little Owl (a species, not a description). It is a disaster from the start. The appropriately named owl (with the Duke’s iron will) had not been hand-reared by a human, and all of Windrow’s attempts to win his trust are met with deep suspicion. Eventually, Wellington escapes.

The second time around is completely different. Windrow’s owl is one of a batch of eggs that are hatched under Dick’s care. When Dick’s son is given the privilege of naming the owl, he calls her Marmite Sandwich, after his favourite thing. Windrow finds Marmite Sandwich in the kitchen, a little ball of feathers with large, shiny eyes.

“‘Kweep’, it said quietly. Enchanted, I leaned closer. It blinked its furry grey eyelids, then jumped very deliberately up on to my right shoulder. It felt like a big, warm dandelion head against my cheek, and it smelt like a milky new kitten. ‘Kweep’, it repeated, very softly.”

On the drive home, the owl escapes from her box and perches on his shoulder throughout the drive, taking a “delicate beak-grip” on his ear to steady herself. Windrow rechristens her Mumble for her way of holding a “quiet conversation with herself, me and the world at large”. And that is the start of a beautiful relationship.

Back in his apartment, Mumble settles into Wellington’s old cage, a large aviary on his balcony (which he has to keep secret from his landlord). Living with what is essentially a wild bird is fascinating, and Windrow is a keen observer. Mumble has a definite personality. She is eternally curious, loves drinking from a dripping tap, riding on the carriage of a typewriter as he types and exploring the back of shelves. Her curiosity can sometimes get her into trouble, like the time she leans over a little too far over the dishwashing water and falls in (and mutters irritably to herself as she slowly dries off). She also tries to feed Windrow bits of raw chicken, and when he avoids the morsels, she tries to stuff them into his ear instead.

As an owlet she is fine with visitors, but as an adult bird she is possessive and attacks anyone else who comes into the apartment. Windrow and Mumble eventually move to the country where she has a larger aviary outdoors.

Windrow’s observations of Mumble are interspersed with a lot of information about owls in general: the different species, how they are coping with the way humans are changing the landscape and their place in folklore. He is obviously passionate about owls and at the end of this book, I felt I had learned a lot about these wonderful birds.